A day after researchers revealed Otherwise, all NSFW content will soon be filtered across X Communities by default. Communities are smaller groups affiliated with X and have their own feeds outside of the main timeline.
The changes appear to confirm previous tests of NSFW communities spotted by several researchers and reverse engineers, and point to a social network that will now directly embrace the adult content that has always been present on the platform.
NSFW (Not Safe for Work) content plays a major role on X, which has been a major venue for advertising for sex workers as well as home to a large number of bots and spam focused on adult content. According to internal documents obtained by Reuters in 2022, approximately 13% of all Twitter posts included NSFW content, such as nude and explicit photos, videos and other pornographic material. What's more, the documents noted that adult content was one of the fastest-growing genres on the platform, even as news and sports declined.
The New York Intelligencer also recently detailed the emergence of spam bots on the service now known as “subjectivity” and other more explicit terms.
Now, confirmation has been included in a long list of updates for X Communities that NSFW-focused communities will be allowed to set themselves as such to prevent their content from being automatically filtered, as is the case in other communities.
The changes, posted by an engineer on X, were reshared by Musk, who commented: “Many upgrades for the X communities!”
Communities are something owner Elon Musk and CEO Linda Yaccarino touted last fall as key to Company X's future growth plans.
According to a transcript obtained by The Verge, Musk explained that the Communities product was growing rapidly but that “there's a lot of work to be done to make Communities compelling.” He also shared that X was seeing “rapid percentage growth” in communities, and was adding new features, such as the ability to include any X account's feed in the community feed. For example, a community focused on video games might want to include X accounts of video game reviewers or prominent commentators, he said. X executives did not share any plans for NSFW communities at the time.
If X can make Communities a successful product, it will likely serve as a competitor to larger forum sites like Reddit and a host of training data for Musk's xAI-powered chatbot Grok, which has exclusive access to X's content.
Alongside the news that community admins can now label themselves as containing adult content, To temporarily and permanently block spammers; Tools to sort posts by popular, newest, and most liked; Media tab for communities on Android; And more, including a host of bug fixes and minor improvements.
The list of what lies ahead in Communities has been fairly extensive as well, with users noting that soon users will be able to explore the top posts and best communities across all communities and tools to discover top communities and posts by topic. Communities will also be promoted and recommended to potential interested users in the For You tab, allowing them to increase their follower count. Mods will have access to community analytics and will be able to pin posts of multiple members. There will also be support for admin-defined spam filtering levels, simplified reporting and moderation pages, and voice spaces in communities, among other things.
The post suggests a new UI for posts and replies may be on the way as well.
X did not return requests for comment on the expected arrival time for any items listed as coming “soon.”
